I had heard good things about the mountain biking at Curt Gowdy State Park in southern Wyoming. And I took to the location – not five hours from Boulder (hi, Fruita), not six (hey there, Moab), but less than two.

But as we sailed across the oceanic grassy swells sprawling west out of Cheyenne, and past the clutter of oil and gas machinery, my heart grew weighty. I feared a precious Saturday and Sunday could be a bust. What kind of trails would we find here?

Things grew worse when we entered the park, between Cheyenne and Laramie. Jet skis and speed boats roared around the small lake. Generators from RVs roared and whined and clattered. When we pulled into the tent-only sites we reserved, the Marlboro-smoking guy sitting by the water’s edge looked awfully edgy, like maybe he had lost his pit bull, or his assault rifle had jammed.

Even more: Only when we arrived did we learn that not only was there a fire ban, there was a cook stove ban.

An angry grizzly bear at close range: Yellowstone River, Yellowstone National Park.

“A Trinidad woman was flown by helicopter late Friday to a hospital after she was mauled by a bear she tried to scare away from her house by clanging pots and pans.Denver Post May 20, 2012″

What to do about bears?

Sometimes banging pots and pans works. Obviously, sometimes not. It’s worked for me a couple of times but I guess I’ll rethink that particular strategy. You never know what’s going to just piss a bear off.

My co-worker has never seen a bear in the Colorado wild. A bear destroyed his tent and sleeping bag while he was out hiking a few years ago but as far as seeing an actual living breathing bruin. Zip. Nada. Zero.

So maybe he should hang out in the woods with me. Or not!

Bears appear in my life at weird and unpredictable times. They’re like phantoms. Now you see one. Now you don’t. Even when I’m looking right at one I have a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact of it.

Mountain lions creep me out. Which is not to say that I’m against them. I’m all for mountain lions. I like the idea of them. I’m just not crazy about coming home late at night and finding one in the front yard. Like the other night.

My youngest son, Brent, called to give me a head’s up. “There’s a mountain lion at the house,” he reported. A big one. After he’d spotted it, the cat had run across the road setting off the security light next door. It was fast, he said, kind of like seeing a ghost.

When I mentioned the lion to my neighbor the next day she merely shrugged. “Yeah, he’s around,” she said, never missing a beat while raking pine needles. “We got a bear comes around too,” she added.

Okay. I know about the bear. Bear and I have already shared a few uncomfortable moments.

“He passes through now and then,” my neighbor said returning to the fact of the lion. “Got a den up there on Berrian Mountain. Never bothers anything.”

I came away with a whole saddlebag’s worth of stories, but the most imminent is that budding filmmakers who like to do their shootin’ in the West — and I reiterate that we’re talking film here, but fake guns are OK, as evidenced by the winner of last year’s contest, “Absaroka” — should be heading to Wyoming right now to work on their entries for a another kind of shot: the one at the $25,000 first prize and some serious bragging rights. (You can watch the winning film in two parts at the end of this post, or the whole thing all nice and pretty at the Wyoming film site.)

Films can be submitted online, and the winner is decided in two rounds. First up is the public vote round, where viewers from around the Web rate the films. A judging panel will then decide the winner based on the top ten most popular entries.

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Here a bison, there a bison, everywhere a bison at Yellowstone National Park in winter.

Some criteria that the judges will keep in mind when viewing the films include cinematography, screenplay/acting, sound design, editing and overall production value.

Travel and OutWest editor Kyle Wagner grew up in Pittsburgh and lived in Lake County, Ill., and Naples, Fla., before moving to Denver in 1993, where she reviewed restaurants for Westword before moving to The Denver Post in 2002. She considers the best days to be those that involve her teenage daughters and doing something outside, preferably mountain biking or whitewater rafting.

Dean Krakel is a photo editor (primarily sports) at The Denver Post. A native of Wyoming, he has authored three books, "Season of the Elk," "Downriver" and "Krakel's West." An avid kayaker, rafter, mountain biker, trail runner, telemark skier and backpacker, Dean's outdoor adventures have taken him around the world.

Douglas Brown was raised about 30 miles west of Philadelphia in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where he spent a lot of time running around in the woods and fields (where he hunted and explored), and in the ocean (where he surfed and stared at the horizon). Now he lives in Boulder and spends as much time hiking, running, skiing and boarding the High Country (and the Boulder foothills) as possible.

Ricardo Baca is the entertainment editor and pop music critic at The Denver Post, as well as the founder and executive editor of Reverb and the co-founder of The UMS. Happy days often involve at least one of these: whitewater rafting, snowshoeing, vintage Vespas, writing, camping, live music, road trips, snowboarding or four-wheeling.